On starting small and building your personal style

Where I am, today’s temperature has a low almost at 0ºF (-17°C), and a high well below freezing, so I am delighting in having access to a wood stove (in addition to the centralized heating). Between snowy woods out the window, a red fox hanging around, and sipping tea by a warm fire it’s all charmingly picturesque.

But this email is not about how flipping cold it is (should I do something about dressing well in the cold?).

This is about building, transforming, and getting started.

If you’ve never built a fire before the basic premise is you layer different sizes of wood from very tiny twigs to much larger logs. From there you set fire to a fire starter, which catches easily, and then sets fire to the twigs, which sets fire to the sticks, which sets fire to medium logs, which sets fire larger logs, etc.

If you hold a match straight to a giant log you may singe some bark but you probably won’t get anything sustainable.

You need to build from tiny to small to medium to big. (My understanding is this is why dry undergrowth in a forest is such a fire hazard. In the right conditions it plays the same role as kindling in a wood stove.)

When it comes to our style, our mainstream culture doesn’t showcase building. We see before and after photos. We see complete transformations in the space of a tv episode.

But no one shows the prep work. Or the internal transformation.

We don’t see the process of making tweaks and adjustments that start tiny, then get small, and then medium, and then big.

So when we go to transform our own lives and make sustainable, lasting changes, we hold a match to a log and wonder why it doesn’t catch.

Or we use a blow torch, torch the log and wonder why it’s not sustainable.

Start small instead. (You don’t need to remain small, it’s just where every transformation starts.)

Do one thing to improve your style today. It could be…